ABOUT

Phuong T. Vuong is a writer, artist, and educator. She is interested in speaking to and calling out the silences in the Vietnamese/ American and Asian/ American experience. She longs to celebrate and cultivate power as much as shed light on dark secrets. If tradition teaches us to never overturn graves, Phuong believes artists can dig into darkness and find much-needed truths. This includes but is not limited to writing about love, sex, war, trauma, race, and other topics her parents wish she would not speak about. As a 1.5 generation immigrant, she writes diaspora-- experiences in Asia as well as at home in Oakland, California and the U.S. By sharing truths and lies, she hopes to humanize her communities and interrogate oppressive systems. Phuong wants to move readers to self-reflection and to creating personal and social change. Being grounded, taking risks, and claiming space are practices she values in her art.

Phuong was a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize 2017 and has been awarded writing fellowships from Tin House Summer Workshop, VONA/Voices, and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches undergraduate creative writing and serves as an editor to TIMBER: A Journal of New Writing.